Bad Dreams

So I've been having problems sleeping.  Don't know if it's my back, our crappy bed, an inability to turn my mind off, staying in bed too long in the mornings, or what, but sleep has been rather elusive of late, which is frustrating.  It's even more frustrating when the neighbors' dog starts yapping at 6:30am.  For 5 hours straight.  And no, I'm not joking about that.  When the little bastard decides to start barking he doesn't stop. I chalk it up to poor (or most likely non-existent) training, no regular incentives to not bark, and the fact that it's a bloody Jack Russell and all those little shits do is bark.

But I digress.  The dog generally doesn't bark in the middle of the night, which is when we go to bed.  So last night, after I eventually fell asleep, I had a bad dream.  To call it a nightmare would be inaccurate; it wasn't even frightening to me, per se, just irritating.  Maybe a little frightening, but not terrifying (and please try not to laugh too hard when you read the next paragraph).

I dreamed I was back in high school, which to some may be terrifying enough, but wasn't so much the problem.  The problem was that I was, once again taking Functions, Statistics, and Trigonometry (better known as FST, since the textbook couldn't bother to write it all out on the cover).  I was struggling mightily with the problems, which was even worse because the answers were in the back of the book, but I was having so many problems getting it that I couldn't even copy the answers correctly.  Seriously, it was so confusing to me that I couldn't look at the full problem and answer written out in the back of the book--everything that I needed to put on my homework--and copy it verbatim onto my page.  I kept trying and screwing it up, erasing it over and over, while getting more and more confused, frustrated, and scared.  Thankfully Dad (and Adam, who, oddly enough, was there and was my husband even though I was in high school--although I was also about 24) told me it was ok to drop the course; I'd already been accepted to university, and dropping the course wouldn't affect that, and it wouldn't mess up my GPA.  But it was still a sad and confusing ending to the dream, and didn't lessen my frustration of being so completely lost that I couldn't even cheat properly.

In reality, FST, which I took the first half of my junior year, was the first high school class in which I didn't get an A.  When I found out I was getting a B--and that there was nothing I could do to change that, despite begging to do extra credit or redo the project (which we were allowed to do for our portfolios, but it wouldn't change the grade)--I had a meltdown.  An absolute nervous breakdown.  Additionally, I was angry because in the math classes, 88% constituted an A.  I believe I had something like 91.4% before the final project of the term, and that final project was weighted so heavily that my final grade for the term was around 84%.  A term's worth of nightly homework, weekly tests, and other projects was overshadowed by one project.  A project of such importance to the world, let alone the class, that I couldn't tell you for the life of me what it was, except that we worked on it as a group and it dropped my final grade by over 7%.

Things didn't improve the next semester.  My spirit was broken.  Mock me if you will, but getting all As was important to me for some ungodly reason (if only this determination had continued into my PLU years).  I got a B in the next term of FST as well, and a B in the second half of my beloved Philosophy in Literature course (no idea on that one).  Again, I really do think my spirit was broken.

Over a decade on and in hindsight, I'm less upset about the Bs in FST.  To this day, I do not understand functions, and I couldn't tell you what they are, why we need them, how to use them, or anything else.  I've always struggled a bit with math, but never like I did with functions.  Everything else I could fake my way through until I eventually understood it, but I never understood functions.  I fared slightly better in statistics--I couldn't have done worse--but I did spent the entirety of that section muttering "three types of lies."  In hindsight, it occurs to me that perhaps the teacher heard me, and that's why my grade suffered so badly.  Anyway, I never would have thought that trigonometry would be my savior.  That was old stuff, having studied it in Algebra II (why there were are sections of algebra I don't know, nor do I understand why they are split up by geometry, but thankfully I understood algebra the second time it came around, since I didn't the first time).  I think it was probably much harder in FST, but after functions and the only slightly improved statistics, trig really was my savior.

Needless to say, FST is where I ended my high school math career.  PDM (which had the same naming issue as FST, and I believe stands for Pre-Discrete Mathematics, or maybe Pre-Calculus and Discrete Mathematics; ask someone who took it for the official name, since we all called it pre-calc) was not going to see me after the failure of FST, and I was trying to take so many other classes anyway.

It's interesting to me the strange thoughts about my past that have been going through my head because of one miserable dream.  It's been a day of reminiscing.